2024 Bismarck/Mandan Trip - Statistics

        Total Trip


Total Days 13
Days on the Road 9
Total Miles 2941
Average Miles/Day 326
Low Mileage Day 227
High Mileage Day 420

        Gas and Mileage


Total Gas Stops 24
Total Gallons 96.42
Total Gas Cost $357.13
Average Miles/Gallon 31.63
Average Cost/Gallon $3.70
Low Cost/Gallon $3.389 - Big Timber, MT
High Cost/Gallon $4.499 - Ellensburg, WA

        General


Total States Visited 6
Total National Parks Visited 1
Total National Monuments Visited 1
Lowest Temperature 51.2°
Highest Temperature 105.4° 
Lowest Elevation 10'
Highest Elevation 10,947'
Days with Rain 1
Nights in Motels 7
Average Cost/Night $214.37
Low Cost Night $181.73
High Cost Night $322.55
Wireless Connections 7
Wired Connections 0
No Connections 0


Web Statistics


I don't usually look at the website statistics since I don't share the links with anyone and don't usually complete all of the pages until after we returned home. These pages are really for our own use anyway so I'm not that concerned with  how many people view or follow our pages anyway. That being said I did take a screen shot of the new Google GA4 Analytics for our pages. In reality, I haven't figured out how to filter out my personal traffic when we are on the road so a lot of that traffic may be my own.

Final Thoughts and Future Plans


This was a nice ride. We were on the road for 4 days, then 4 days at our son and daughter-in-law's house, and finally 5 more days on the road. It was nice to get a break and really nice to spend some time there. Overall the weather was pretty good. We had a few minor showers but never needed to put on our rain gear. We had a few chilly mornings but only put on our heated vests once and didn't have to turn them on. Even the day we road up to Beartooth Pass, the temperature never got below 57 degrees and the sun was shining and there was very little wind. This was a refreshing change from previous trips through the pass.

The bike ran well and it looks like we solved most of the problems from our last trip. I got a new headset from IMC Motorcom and it worked well - we had no problem communicating back and forth. Speaking of headsets, we did have a problem listening to music on the trip. We record long sessions from XM/Sirius radio that we stream on our computer at home and record with Audacity. The we transfer them to my phone and play them through an FM transmitter while we are riding. The problem was that there was a lot of background static and, at times, it was hard to hear the music. It seems that, when you plug into the audio jack, Android assumes you are plugging in headphones and drops the media volume setting way down I assume for safety reasons so I was turning the motorcycle volume way up and thus getting all the background noise. If I went to the media volume setting after plugging into the audio jack and setting it to the max level, I could easily control the volume from the motorcycle volume control and the music worked fine. Unfortunately I didn't figure that out until the second to the last day. At least we know what the problem was and should be good to go next trip.

The speedometer cable worked fine so we had cruise control the entire trip which was convenient since we were on Interstates a lot. Because of that our mileage was not that great. The average for the trip ended up being 31.63 mpg while our last trip was 35.02 mpg. Of course the last trip we stayed off the Interstates and this trip we did not. Interestingly the time we were in Yellowstone where the speed limit is 45 we got 41.3 mpg - a significant difference. We also averaged much lower gas costs this trip. We averaged $3.70 per gallon this trip versus $5.19 on the last trip.

While gas prices have dropped, hotel costs have risen significantly. On our last trip the average hotel cost was $151.88 where on this trip it was $214.37. Even if we leave out the night in West Yellowstone, the average was still $168.29 and they have all sorts of extra fees and charges. Most of our rooms were fine but the WiFi at the Holiday Inn Express in Pendleton, OR was terrible. There is really no excuse for poor WiFi these days.

On our last trip in California we encountered gas nozzles that had a spring loaded device on the nozzle that's supposed to capture the vapors emitted when your tank fills. That might be fine for cars but it doesn't work on motorcycles at all. I found some devices on the Internet that you can slip over the nozzle to hold the spring loaded collar back. I had a couple of these with me on the trip but I never got to use them and see how well they work. I don't know if that's good or bad.

Finally our data logger. This is still a holdover from the last trip. I thought the problem was bad connections so I made sure I cleaned all of the connections before the trip and it worked fine for a few days. Eventually it seemed to smoke one of my SD cards and just wasn't reliable. I even bought a spare SD card in West Yellowstone. Unfortunately the only thing I could get was a 64 GB card. It seems that the firmware in my logger will only support up to a 4 GB card.In the end it appears that the PCB in the logger had come loose in the case and the connector plug was not getting fully seated. I bought a couple of spare 1 GB cards and have tried everything several times since I fixed the PCB and it seems to work fine. I'm still logging with Ultra GPS on my phone as well and that works fine for drawing the Google map and geolocating the pictures. I can also use GPS Visualizer to produce a nice altitude profile so the only think I would miss is the temperature profile if the logger fails again. I can live with that but I may look into a backup logger and especially a spare connecting cable.

We're currently thinking of a second trip later this summer maybe to White Sands National Park In New Mexico. We'll see what happens.

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